Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing Cooperation and Adversity in Water Infrastructure Management

This research examines what forces contribute to cooperation or adversity in contexts of resource scarcity and population displacement. While population displacement is often characterized as contributing to tension in the host contexts to where these populations are displaced, less understood are the conditions that promote cooperation and solidarity, especially in circumstances of protracted displacement and shared residence.

This dissertation research addresses these questions by investigating the role of communal water infrastructure, such as public water taps, water truck deliveries, and wells, in promoting cooperation, or instigating tension, between residents of various social, religious, and economic backgrounds. In addition to supporting the training of a doctoral student, the findings from this project will be shared with organizations, development practitioners, and policy experts.

This doctoral dissertation project examines the factors influencing access to water and the maintenance of communal water infrastructure. This project compares two localities: one marked by citizen-displaced population cooperation and solidarity, and another by continued tension. Both localities contain similar communal water infrastructures which serve as routine gathering sites for both citizen and refugee residents.

This project therefore investigates how a shared dependence on infrastructure can enable cooperative relations. In addition to examining how residents' social worlds frame their encounters, this project explores how infrastructure breakdown, repair, and neglect reconfigure social relations. Ethnographic research methods are employed, including participant observation, interviews, and archival research among resident populations, as well as with non-governmental actors who oversee the infrastructure.

This research contributes to contemporary social science and anthropology by better understanding the role of communal infrastructure in mediating and reconfiguring cooperative and conflictual social relations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.